Extinct Critique

Anna Kornbluh Extinct Critique That ideology critique is contentious enough to warrant this special issue of SAQ owes in large part to Bruno Latour’s 2005 essay, “Why Has Cri- tique Run Out of Steam?,” published in Critical Inquiry, which is a landmark journal of cultural, aesthetic, political, and literary theory across the humanities. In a clarion call, Latour raised alarm about a practice so recurrent in contemporary theory as to be a ritual itself: namely, that behind every fact, every façade—indeed behind nature itself— lies a social construction just waiting to be uncov- ered by the critic. The unavowed theology of this critical habit, he argued, enabled climate denialism, because plutocrats themselves had come to invoke the constructedness of facts and broad epistemic uncertainty as justification for their lucrative lethal carbonization of the earth’s atmo- sphere. Out of steam, critique backs fossil fuel. Latour’s concern establishes a connection between critique and practice, academic theory and political reality, one which makes a neat homology (critique exposes social construction; Republicans and corporations !nd this exposure congenial). But his argument also deliberately occludes the causes of this homology, since he derides the hubris of “explanations resorting automatically to The South Atlantic Quarterly 119:4, October 2020 !"# 10.1215/00382876-8663675 © 2020 Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/119/4/767/824352/1190767.pdf by UNIV ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO user on 08 October 2020 768 The South Atlantic Quarterly • October 2020 power, society, discourse . empires, capitalism” (Latour 2004: 229) and endorses in contrast “a renewed empiricism” (231). Where a materialist might say that carbon executives deny climate change because it pays, Latour’s empiricism eschews the alleged transcendence of causality, regard- ing instead the immanence of horizontal, distributed interaction. Heeding Latour’s call, the ensuant movement of postcritique in political theory, phi- losophy, and literary and cultural studies has adopted both a horizontalist ethos and empiricist episteme—but strikingly has not preserved this origi- nating concern with climate. Nor, we might note sixteen years later, have ruling ideas changed in response to the postcritical turn. Rather, since we put down critique, climate denialism has become full-throated, full-throttle climate nihilism.1 If critique and the discourse of its exhaustion has something to do with the crisis of ecological degradation, perhaps this something can be grasped less through what critique produces in the world, and more through how the world produces critique, including the critique of critique. Such a reversal corresponds to the original procedure of critique in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The German Ideology, which instantiates materialism as regard for the environments of ideas. Surveying the “ruling ideas” in their present, Marx and Engels observe of their colleagues “It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German phi- losophy with German reality” (Marx and Engels 1998: 36). “Reality” they proceed to specify as the material environment that supports the conceptu- alization and communication of ideas, what they call the “de!nite social relations” that enable the “existence of living human individuals” (37). These relations involve “!rst . the organization” of individuals and their conse- quent relation to the rest of nature” (37). Critique here already importantly con!gures itself as ecological awareness: an inquiry into the connection of ideas to the social relations capacitating the production of human existence.2 Of course ecology is a vastly complicated interrelation of manifold agencies, but as the Marxist theorist Raymond Williams pointed out long before Latourian horizontality, the networked assemblage, object oriented ontology, and postcritical a#ects became ruling ideas, “complexity” must not obscure the general “intentions” of capitalism, for only if we grasp those tendencies in their distinction can we imagine and implement genuine alternative modes of production, including now, when it is too late. My title “Extinct Critique” marks this too-lateness and this materialist impulse: not merely metaphorical exhaustion but material extinction now conditions critique. The wholesale destruction of the precious environment Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/119/4/767/824352/1190767.pdf by UNIV ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO user on 08 October 2020 Kornbluh • Extinct Critique 769 of the university means there are only last critics standing; the wholesale destruction of Earth means there will soon be few humans at all. How does postcritique register or indeed perform this environment? What are the social relations of production and reproduction that materially determine postcritique? And since critique entails not only “negative” diagnoses but also a$rmative projections of emancipation, what is to be a$rmed after sit- uating postcritique in relation to extinction? Eve Sedgwick’s formidable lament of paranoid reading decried most of all a lack of surprise attendant upon gotcha historicizing arguments, and pioneers in literary study like Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Rita Felski eloquently conjure enchantment and immersion as alterna- tives to critique—but the “no future” of extinction will not be a surprise, and we will not be ironically distant from it. Most academic critics live all too acutely the degradation of their environments, even if the highest theorists have been the most insulated from labor exploitation and industrial restruc- turing. While the number of students going to college has increased steadily in the thirty-year period since states started dramatically slashing public funding for higher education, the percentage of students majoring in humanities subjects has plummeted. The profound recission of state funding has meant all manner of privatization of the public, administrative bloat and upward wealth transfer, precaritization of labor (75 percent of academic instruction nationwide is ful!lled by instructors other than tenure-stream faculty), and ballooning college costs. In many of the most extreme cases— Alaska, Oklahoma, Montana, North Dakota—defunding correlates to the volatility of the extractive economy, as Sheila Liming (2019) recently com- mented. Meanwhile the great recession, the jobless recovery, the continued privatization of public resources, and responsibilization of individual fami- lies for wellbeing has exerted vise grip pressures on the regard for the func- tion and purpose of the university, with extreme vocationalization supplanting general education and liberal arts curricula. This backdrop of %attening contextualizes the regnant %at ontology in so many theoretical !elds. The profession of criticism is being disassem- bled, the ecosystem for thinking is imperiled by rapidly escalating levels of cognitive-compromising carbon, and meanwhile our thought leaders rhap- sodize these declinations as “weak theory” and “amateur criticism.” The trumpeting of amateurism as “a feminist alternative to the disciplinary fash- ioning of criticism” (Micir and Vadde 2018: 519) by modernity’s cult of exper- tise has unsavory parallels with the anti-expert, anti-disciplinary deskilling of university labor, as the contingent faculty of Twitter like Jacquelyn Ardam Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/119/4/767/824352/1190767.pdf by UNIV ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO user on 08 October 2020 770 The South Atlantic Quarterly • October 2020 quickly pinpointed.3 In fecund retreat from “masterful” “suspicious” “heroic” Marxism (Best and Marcus 2009: 6, 11, 15), “surface reading” and weak theory pro#er tender mercies of “the proximate, the provisional, and the proba- bilistic” (Saint-Amour 2018: 440). An adjacent methodological embrace of the personal sancti!es in the domain of academic literary study the very logic of the wider literary marketplace—personalization, memoir, auto!c- tion, immediacy– and the logic of the even wider economic sphere, of new enclosures. These attenuated personal knowledge frames have deep roots in standpoint epistemology, and their consolidation in the recent past tracks oh so closely with heightened austerity. Jeff Williams (2015) has usefully umbrellaed many postcritical methods as “the new modesty”—scientization and de-interpretation, less speculation and synthesis and more use of statis- tics, MRIs, or other data, the supplanting of explanation by description. Such minimization of specialized knowledge protocols and a hurry to take up the frameworks of putatively more legitimate disciplines like computer science, quantitative sociology, and laboratory psychology mirrors our industrial diminishment—the structural adjustment of our profession, with its acute decommissioning of cultural and literary interpretation. Seen from this environment, postcritical praxis looks like methodological innovation as alibi for the tenured elite: so there will not be another employed generation of professional critique? We don’t need it anyway. The synergy between modesty, weakness, critique out of steam, and the ruin of the university combusts in the very speci!c historical situation of the post-great-recession university, but a longer arc of theoretical unbinding also tracks with the great acceleration of fossil fuels. The futurelessness

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